Voodoo Shop - Softcover

Padel, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0701173017 ISBN 13: 9780701173012

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2002

Synopsis

Voodoo Shop begins with a love letter from the innocent Tatyana to the sophisticated Eugene Onegin and ends with a haunting meditation on departure and migration. In the intervening poems, Ruth Padel takes her reader on a series of spectacular journeys across the world and into the complex landscape of an intense love affair. Renowned for the dazzling scope of her imagination, and for her linguistic and formal adventurousness, Padel reveals herself to be at the height of her powers in this collection. The poems are wonderfully different, shifting from witty exuberance to quiet restraint in the blink of an eye, leaping from Ireland to Brazil as the page turns. One minute they are in sumptuous technicolour, the next minute in black and white. They are grand poems addressed to a large audience and crowded with other people - Tori Amos and Bridget Riley make an appearance - and yet they are also starkly intimate: the solitary voice of a woman opening her heart to a man. This is a collection about separation and unity, the search for forms of faith in the face of confusion, for a personal voodoo. In their structure and ordering the poems reflect their themes: like the tesserae of a mosaic, their shimmering diversity makes perfect sense when viewed together.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Padel is a winner of the National Poetry Competition. This is her fifth collection of poetry. She also writes arts journalism, including the popular 'Sunday Poem' column in the Independent on Sunday, and non fiction. Her most recent book, I'm a Man, is a provocative study of rock music, Greek myth and modern masculinity.

Edition details

• Publisher: Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0701173017
• ISBN 13: 9780701173012
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80